PerfView vs. TraceEvent

Not sure which you should use? This document aims to point you in the right direction.

Start With PerfView If Your Goal Is To...

• Collect an adhoc Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) trace to analyze program behavior or a performance issue.
• Collect an adhoc heap snapshot to analyze a managed memory issue such as a managed memory leak.
• Use the flight recorder mode to capture an ETW trace of hard to reproduce behavior.
• Perform adhoc analysis of a previously collected performance trace.
• Diff two performance traces to or managed memory heap snapshots to root cause a performance issue.
• Use a GUI-based performance analysis tool.

Start With TraceEvent If Your Goal Is To...

• Have programmatic access to trace collection and/or trace processing and analysis.
• Implement a service that captures or processes traces at scale.
• Build collection and/or processing capabilities into an existing application.

PerfView Limitations

• PerfView is not designed to be used as a capture or processing agent in services. It is designed for use in user-interactive sessions.
• PerfView is not supported on operating system SKUs such as nanoserver that do not have GUI libraries installed. See PerfViewCollect if you need to capture adhoc traces on these SKUs.